The total number of fraudulent votes for aborting the pregnancy is astounding. I have no idea why people would go to the lengths that they did to submit fraudulent votes towards abortion. But this all leads back to the reason for voting and how many people don’t take it seriously. In our poll we asked people to vote on the outcome of one potential life, but at every government election the population votes for officials that make decisions that affect thousands, if not millions of people, often in a life-changing way.

When people vote during elections they often allow a single topic like abortion to determine their choice. I don’t really care what controversial issue is being addressed; it could be the death penalty, homosexuals in the military, legalizing marijuana, universal healthcare, etc. But when people vote based on a single topic they aren’t necessarily seeing the bigger picture. So what if your chosen candidate is “Pro-life” if you disagree with them on every other issue? We need to take more responsibility for our choices whether that’s choosing the future of a potential child or choosing the next leader of the free world.

The number of fraudulent votes (both for abortion and keeping the baby) made me realize that people were making assumptions about us as a couple. We did not start the poll to remove responsibility for the decision from ourselves, we merely asked people to weigh in on what they thought our decision should be. The poll was a tool in which to gather quantifiable data about a two-party vote on the issue of abortion. We wanted to see how the results would stack up to “Pro-life” vs. “Pro-choice” polls when the subject of the vote was a specific potential life as opposed to just a statistic.

So when it comes right down to it, the poll was useful to us in that it gave us insight into what people were thinking even if they didn’t choose to comment. There are going to be those who vote just to get a kick out of it. Others that don’t vote because they don’t truly care about the outcome or don’t feel comfortable weighing in on a decision when they don’t know enough about the people involved. And there are those people who take it seriously, give thoughtful commentary, and end up swaying the vote (hopefully) in their favor. So if we knock out the fraudulent votes, people were overwhelmingly voting for us to keep the baby.

This vote has also taught me that you can be for a woman’s right to choose but that doesn’t make you anti-life (as the name “Pro-life” would lead people to believe). Just like being “Pro-life” doesn’t automatically make you anti-choice, the two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. The titles themselves actually distract from the actual topic which is whether or not abortion should be legal and although I am firmly in the liberal camp on the issue of legal abortion in the U.S., I discourage women from using abortion as a repeated form of birth control.

I side with the popular idea that a woman should always be able to have an abortion in the event of rape and incest, or if the life of the mother is at risk (whether that be from medical issues or domestic abuse) before the point of viability. I also understand teenage girls and other young single women making a “mistake” and finding themselves alone and trying to get through pregnancy and the uncertainty of raising a child. But I would also like to empower women to take more responsibility for their bodies and the potential life that they may carry.

We all know that sex can lead to pregnancy, so taking precautions is the right thing to do. Admittedly, even the best precautions don’t always work, which is why abortion is on the table as an option. But if an individual finds that they need multiple abortions over time it may be the right decision for them to take more permanent measures (IUD, sterilization, etc.), but again it is always the woman’s right to choose and so it’s her responsibility to make the right decision for herself and her potential child.